


Right Answer

by lightgetsin



Series: A Deeper Season [2]
Category: Vorkosigan Saga
Genre: Character Study, Community: help_pakistan, Disability, Gen, Growing Up, Mental Illness, Politics, a deeper season, fathers and sons, power, the Vor Game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-21
Updated: 2011-04-21
Packaged: 2017-10-18 10:58:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/188235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightgetsin/pseuds/lightgetsin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes when Aral looked at him with that chilly assessment, Gregor’s skin crawled, as if he’d done something terrible that he couldn’t remember. Or as if he were going to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Right Answer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [salable_mystic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/salable_mystic/gifts).



> For salable-mystic, who won me in help_pakistan and who was then incredibly patient.
> 
> Thanks to cmshaw, treewishes, and readerjane for beta.
> 
> This is loosely _A Deeper Season_ verse, though set well before the main story arc.

I

Gregor was just thinking of going to bed when a fist tapped out an ImpSec identification knock against his door. The academy dorm rooms were tiny; Gregor’s was the same size as everyone else’s, down to the centimeter. Which was meaningless given the extraordinary luxury of having it to himself. Gregor was squirmingly relieved not to have to share space with a stranger, and also jealous of the instantaneous bonds that had sprung up between many roommate pairs. He had no such immediate social currency, not in splendid isolation down at the end of the hall, with a room of security people on either side.

He took two steps to the door. He already knew it would be Illyan; it could only be, this late.

Indeed. “Sire,” Illyan said, saluting crisply. Gregor was never ‘Cadet Vorbarra,’ not to him. “The Lord Regent requests your presence.”

 _Now_? Gregor’s nerves jangled uneasily. “Just a minute,” he said, and found his boots and jacket.

Doors were closed by lights-out regulation the length of the hall. Illyan paced him just the same, eyes tracking ceaselessly all the way out to the car.

“What is it?” Gregor asked, as soon as the canopy closed. They didn’t usually bother to parade him out for anything except the most important public functions these days, not that Gregor’s entire academy career _wasn’t_ an important public function. But this was something different.

“The Lord Regent would like your input on an urgent issue,” Illyan said.

“. . . Ah,” Gregor said. He was unenlightened, but suddenly a little resentful. What would happen if he told the driver to turn around, that there was an important five-space math test early in the morning, and they all knew the Lord Regent would do what was best anyway, with or without him. Hmm. Probably best leave that last part out, even in fantasy.

It would be . . . an interesting experiment. Not worth performing, to save everyone the embarrassment. Things happened to Gregor inexorably – there was no real point objecting.

It was true, though. The exam would be grueling tomorrow; Gregor was prepared, but he’d need his sleep to get through it. There was a certain . . . delicate calibration of effort required in these situations. Grades and standings were posted publicly outside the mess every week. Gregor had quickly learned that it was best if he didn’t come first. Every time it happened, he could see the entire academy losing what little faith it had in this tenuous new officer meritocracy idea. He couldn’t be average, though; when he’d tried that, the Dean had practically sprained something to get him discrete tutoring. And he couldn’t come second, because then whoever came first would be smug or, far worse, crawlingly apologetic. Third or fourth was best, all things considered. But that kind of consistent placement required _just_ the right amount of effort, and that required sleep.

And Aral Vorkosigan didn’t need his input, that was also true.

Gregor said nothing. It was an easy default position.

They went to the Residence, rather than to ImpSec HQ or Barrayar General Command. Gregor looked dispassionately up at the building as they disembarked. This had been his home once, with Aral and Cordelia and Miles, and dimly, before that, with his mother. And it would be his home again in a few years, alone.

Unless the gentle trickle of eligible girls turned into more than a suggestion. Talk about sharing his space with a stranger. And what if he wasn’t lucky in the lottery, what if they didn’t form a rapport out of proximity and need? What if it wasn’t about luck at all – what if he just wasn’t capable of sustaining that kind of connection?

Barrayar’s Lord Regent waited alone in the green silk room. A coffee pot steamed gently on the sideboard, but no one was there to pour.

“Sire,” the Lord Regent said, standing. He tipped his chin at Illyan, who closed the door quietly.

They’d left the chair at the head of the table for him. That didn’t happen at many of the more crowded military sessions Gregor sat in on; he was usually shuffled several seats down the table, solidly into the ranks of those not expected to speak. But Lord Vorkosigan was punctilious to the point of obsession about it.

Gregor sat. The Lord Regent waited politely and sat. Illyan poured coffee all around, and sat.

“Sire,” Illyan said, “My Lord Regent. We apprehended Robert Laslowe in a raid an hour ago, along with his inner circle, a cache of short range biological weapons, and five million marks.”

There was something in Gregor that went quiet and trembling at the first possibility of bad news. It did not respond well to late night conferences – to anything out of the ordinary. He made himself relax; if there was something bad to hear, it would have come first.

“Is the raid public knowledge?” the Lord Regent asked.

Illyan shook his head. “Not yet. And it may not be. We found them about seventy miles north on some relatively isolated country property, and the raid was very quiet.”

The Lord Regent nodded, making a _go on_ gesture.

Illyan elaborated at length, detailing the string of tiny intelligence blips going back nine months that had culminated in two dozen commandos gassing a pack of Komarran terrorists unconscious without a single shot fired. The Lord Regent listened attentively, tipped forward in his chair, hands open on the table. Gregor looked back and forth, increasingly puzzled. He felt like he was watching a play, that they were acting this scene out for his benefit. But why?

“I see,” the Lord Regent said at last. “And our options?”

“Four,” Illyan said promptly. “We can try Laslowe publicly, and either imprison or execute him. Or we can send him to Stierzansk without trial, privately. Or we can execute him privately.”

The Lord Regent flickered a look up the table at Gregor. Checking to see he was paying attention, probably. “Your recommendation?” he said to Illyan.

And Gregor knew why he had been summoned, suddenly. Aral Vorkosigan didn’t need his help to make decisions. And he probably didn’t want it, either. But the Lord Regent was organized, the Lord Regent was practical, the Lord Regent could bring down as many birds with one stone as he god damn well pleased to. And these days, he seemed to have Gregor in his sights more and more.

Illyan talked. Gregor listened, feeling himself automatically retreat into impassivity. His hands folded themselves in his lap, his feet stopped scuffing the carpet. And on the inside he felt himself curl up, still and small and cold.

Illyan talked of political contingencies, the value of a public display of power and invulnerability, the countervailing risk of behaving too harshly for squeamish galactic standards, the risk of inciting further Komarran resentments, on and on. It was an excellent summary reenactment of a lively debate from one of Gregor’s classes his first term. Gregor had known better than to say a word through any of that, thank you.

Except this time it was real. And this time the Lord Regent kept looking at him, an openly assessing stare. He’d been doing that a lot, this last year. _What are you made of_? he seemed to be asking.

Gregor had grown up with the unarticulated awareness of his role as an object of faith – that he would be Emperor because he should be, that it was his right and privilege.

And then one morning when he was fourteen, he’d woken to the chilling realization that it was nonsense. It was worse than nonsense – it was superstition. A hundred little things Cordelia had said to him, the way the Lord Regent had begun looking at him with that remote, weighing calculation, it all crystallized. This notion that sovereignty was heritable, that couldn’t be right, not really, at least if it was supposed to be something more than the Vorbarra nose. And Gregor believed – he had been taught to believe – that it was so much more.

Gregor had his mother’s smile, he was told, and her arched brow, and her composure, and a dozen other things. Oddly, no one seemed interested in committing themselves on what he’d gotten from his father, aside from his eyes. So from where, Gregor had wondered, was he supposed to get political acumen? The respect of the military? Reliable judgment with lives hanging in the balance?

The things his Lord Regent had, effortlessly. And if Gregor didn’t have them, it wouldn’t be a blameless failure of genetic chance. It would be because he’d failed to learn them. Because he was too introverted, because he didn’t understand people – because sometimes he didn’t even _like_ them.

Illyan had switched sides after arguing the virtues of a public trial for fifteen minutes straight. He advocated private consignment to a top security prison station in erratic orbit several light minutes out. The Lord Regent listened attentively, nodding along to Illyan’s points about the usefulness of a future bargaining chip for some unpredictable need, and the potential value of Laslowe’s information, if he was among the few whose Fast Penta allergies could be chemically reversed over several years.

Gregor had never been to Stierzansk. Would he be allowed, if asked? Probably not. And what would he see, anyway? A carefully choreographed and sterilized display, anything too disturbing shuffled discretely out-of-sight. There would be no point.

The wisdom of his forefathers was supposed to run in Gregor’s veins with his imperial blood. It didn’t, patently. And how was he supposed to fake it when he could go nowhere and see nothing?

“Thank you,” the Lord Regent said, when Illyan concluded his crisp monologue. “Well done. And to your men. Give us a minute, please.”

And here it was. Illyan rose silently, unsurprised, and left. The Lord Regent stood as well, giving Gregor his broad shoulders and straight spine as he went to the sideboard. He came back with two fresh mugs of coffee, nudging Gregor’s cooled cup aside with his wrist.

It was after midnight. Gregor had seen him drink a pot of coffee during an evening meeting, and then go straight off to bed with no apparent effect. Gregor wasn’t so lucky – caffeine made him edgy and sleepless. Well. Edgier and more sleepless.

“Sire,” the Lord Regent said gravely, folding his hands around his mug. “Your orders?”

“Ah—“ Gregor had been expecting another discussion, a rehashing of Illyan’s points with a gloss. He had expected to be led through the decision process in stages.

The Lord Regent watched him flounder for a minute, sipping at his coffee.

“I don’t—“ Gregor began, then pulled himself together. “Chief Illyan’s points were all well-made. I can see advantages and disadvantages for every option.” He swallowed under that impassive consideration. Damn it. He sounded like a mediocre political science term paper.

“Good,” the Lord Regent said, and waited again.

“I—“ Gregor took a hasty sip of coffee, careless of what it would do to his nerves. He tumbled all of Illyan’s comments frantically, trying to shake some obvious solution from them. He hadn’t even been paying full attention, he was sure he’d missed things. “I think I would like some advice,” he said suddenly, with a flood of relief. “From my closest advisor.”

The Lord Regent shook his head. “Unavailable,” he said shortly. “As your advisors will be on some occasions, for any number of reasons.”

Resentment rose, suddenly. For this – this test, for every test before it, for the Lord Regent’s towering competence. He had been the man best suited for the job – he had been _chosen_. Gregor had not been chosen, and he was increasingly sure that he was not well-suited.

The Lord Regent’s face softened, a little. “It’s not a trick question,” he said. “Or an easy one. There is no right answer.” He paused, mouth twisting. “There is no _correct_ answer. Also no right one, perhaps.”

Then what was the point? Wouldn’t a computerized decision matrix do better than Gregor ever could?

And the Lord Regent was wrong, anyway. There was a right answer, inasmuch as there was a decision he had already made. But that was all right. What Gregor had to do was match it, reverse engineer the process.

But that was the problem, wasn’t it? He was not Aral Vorkosigan, and Gregor suspected he never would be, not even forty years from now, assuming he survived that long.

It was absurd to still want to impress someone, even as you were seethingly angry at them just for existing. But there it was, anyway. What did Aral _want_ from him?

“. . . Kill him,” Gregor said. “I mean, um. Execute him. Privately.”

He had an entire five seconds to feel relieved. There, it was done. It had been easy in the end. Just deciding, and speaking.

And then something happened in Aral’s face. Too fast to quite understand, but Gregor thought _Why is he afraid?_ and then wondered where that had come from.

“Sire,” Aral said. His voice was hoarse. There was another beat of silence, and then the Lord Regent stood, straight-backed and decisive. “As you command,” he said.

And Gregor knew: there might not have been a right answer, but he had chosen a wrong one. The room felt suddenly cold.

It wasn’t disappointment he’d seen. It was something more complicated. Sometimes when Aral looked at him with that chilly assessment, Gregor’s skin crawled, as if he’d done something terrible that he couldn’t remember. Or as if he were going to. It was like that, but far worse.

“Thank you, Sire,” the Lord Regent said, and bowed himself out.

*

  


II

The trip home from the Hegen Hub took weeks. Gregor’s advisors had suggested a circuitous route, pausing at every available port of call to milk political capital out of this brief moment of good will, and Gregor had agreed. Agreed, not acquiesced. A distinction fine enough to cut himself on.

Life was slower shipboard, anyway, with communications delayed hours or days, and not much to do. It was difficult. Gregor spent half his time pleased with himself, exploring this new sense of poise and balance. He had torn himself violently free from power, and on returning it had seated itself more deeply in him, more securely.

The rest of the time he despaired. There and back again, and what had he gained, really? A few weeks of another man’s destiny, and an experience of being sexually manipulated.

There was something to that, at least. Even if it was only the grim confirmation of what Gregor had privately suspected since his first fumbling experiences. Because he had a large enough data set now, even as scanty as it was, to be sure that no, he was not having the transcendent experience he was supposed to. Sex was nice like a good stretch was nice, but it was also . . .

He really should not be surprised that he would find the pinnacle of intimacy so off-puttingly . . . intimate. Gregor had long suspected he would not be a very good partner to whatever poor girl eventually got herself shackled to him; learning that he would likely fall short in the most basic marital duties, as well as in higher romance, was not a surprise.

Though of course, sex with Cavilo hadn’t expanded his data set enough to answer the other looming question. Seeing as she was, after all, a woman.

But there had never been anything Gregor could do about that, and never would be. He’d been living with the quiet suspicion of his own homosexuality for a long time. Whatever fear he’d ever felt over the matter was long gone. Gregor didn’t object to it from repugnance. It was just another accident of birth among many, another way happiness was out of his reach.

The Prime Minister stayed largely out of Gregor’s way on the _Prince Serg_ , aside from required diplomatic duties at each of their stops. That was just fine. Gregor still couldn’t name the force of cool control which had operated his body and spoken with his voice in their one and only interview. Aral had started out white-faced and hoarse with rage. Gregor couldn’t remember everything they’d said. He could only recall sitting down while Aral paced, answering calmly, not flushing, not stammering. And how Aral had slowed, had looked at him with puzzlement and then, almost immediately, with narrow-eyed keenness. He had stopped what was clearly a long-pent lecture, he had stood at parade rest, and he had taken Gregor’s orders calmly, with serious attention.

But that had generally been true, hadn’t it? It was just that Gregor had not often said much worth his attention before, and he had felt small and miserable under that unfailing scrutiny.

They hadn’t spoken in private since. Gregor knew that couldn’t be allowed to stand. He could not be estranged from his Prime Minister, he did know that. But after Aral had left him that first time, Gregor had clamped his hands between his knees for half an hour, breathing through the panic and the shakes. He didn’t know where the composure had come from, and he didn’t know if it would ever come back.

They arrived home in a triumphal mode. Gregor endured a series of highly uncomfortable public displays of adulation, and a more uncomfortable string of private interviews, most taking the form of abject groans of relief. The machine had rolled ever on in his absence, and Gregor strongly suspected it would have continued on without him for much longer, perhaps indefinitely. But it was still nice to have been missed, for the little of it that was about him personally.

Miles was a breath of fresh air in all that. He came for lunch, though Gregor could tell that three-quarters of him was already out there again, five jump points away and accelerating like mad.

It was a wrench, letting him go. Gregor had made a list of all the things he needed to do, if he was going to take this seriously, if he was going to try to be more than a silhouette on some coins. He needed advisors. New advisors he had picked, to supplement those he had inherited. And better chosen, this time, trustworthy men and women who would speak truth to him without flinching. He needed people he could _talk_ to.

But Miles was going away again. Miles could barely stand to be here at all, patently. And what could Gregor do, order him to be happy about staying here? He could make a very well-educated guess about how that would turn out, from vivid personal experience.

But Miles could always carry a conversation, and he listened with more patience than Gregor probably deserved after all he’d dragged Miles through. And he validated all of Gregor’s frustrated inner wailings about his value by offering up cogent, to-the-point advice, and promptly vanishing off to his mercenaries in the blink of an eye.

Gregor was oddly bereft in his absence. Miles had been his lifeline back home, even when Gregor hadn’t wanted one, and he’d been a friend. His departure tipped Gregor off the edge into one of his bad times, when everything seemed gray and exhausting and useless.

Except this time, there was something Gregor was supposed to do about that.

Cordelia came for tea ten days after Miles left. She arrived in a billow of full afternoon call regalia, looking as amusedly entertained by the entire spectacle as usual. And she clearly didn’t miss the implications of having tea laid out in Gregor’s private sitting room, without an armsman or servant in sight.

“Well, love, here we are,” she said, kissing his cheek. “Now, would it be more useful if I interrogated you, or if I chatted about inconsequential things for a while.”

She could always make him laugh. Miles had inherited that gift. Or possibly tunneled his own ingenious, independent way into Gregor’s psyche.

“Let’s talk about Miles,” he said on a whim.

“Let’s!” Cordelia said, beaming. “My wee chick, off to terrorize the known galaxy. Warms my heart, it does.” For some reason, Gregor was put in mind of Henri Vorvolk’s father, years ago, expounding on the benefits of rigorous exercise for high-strung young hunting dogs.

Miles was a fruitful topic. Cordelia had endless opinions, and somehow her wry, unapologetic tenderness soothed Gregor’s nerves. It made it easier, when they came to the heart of things.

“I’m tired all the time,” Gregor said. And, “I can’t sleep. Everything seems like it will cost more than I have. I’m not supposed to feel this way, am I?” And, at last, “I need to know: was he really a monster?”

“Ah,” Cordelia said softly. And “I’m sorry that I didn’t know. You don’t have to feel this way, depression can be treated. You can be all right, and you will be.”

 _Depression_ , Gregor thought. _Of course. Why didn’t I realize that’s what it is_? It was easier to think about in those terms. Melancholy was a character flaw; depression was a disease. And Cordelia Vorkosigan believed that diseases could be managed, and her boys _would_ manage.

“And for the rest,” she said, setting down her teacup. “Your father was a sadist, yes. Possibly a psychopath. I never got that close to him, personally, but I do know some things.” Her busy hands folded themselves in her lap, suddenly contained.

Gregor swallowed. He’d known it was true all along – it just made so much sense out of things that didn’t. But here was the incontrovertible, a story he couldn’t dismiss as rumor or hatemongering or lies. He’d expected to have many more questions than he suddenly did. “I don’t know,” he said carefully. “I . . . did he . . . hurt my mother?”

“Yes,” she said. “In ways I can guess at, and ways only she likely ever knew.” She hesitated. “Your birth meant a possibility of safety for her,” she continued at last. “Isolation from him. I didn’t know her well, but I think you brought her back to happiness again.”

Gregor nodded carefully. He’d been prodding at his memories for weeks now, mistrusting and afraid of what he’d uncover. But that rang true with his earliest fragmentary memories of a calm, quiet, regulated world, a cloistered life, just the two of them. No buried horrors.

At least aside from some fragmentary memories of running feet and grabbing hands, and Captain Negri’s blood everywhere. But that was a familiar nightmare.

“And he hurt other people,” Gregor said.

She nodded, oddly restrained for someone who always seemed to have the impossibly right words for every occasion. Except this one, apparently. It occurred to Gregor, far too late, to wonder what he was carelessly unearthing, making her do this. What if these weren’t old, theoretical victims he was asking about?

“I can tell you what I know,” Cordelia said. “Though much of it is second hand. And I imagine you’ve already guessed that Simon can tell you much more.”

The thought of quizzing Illyan was appalling, even if his computerized memory was safely . . . sterile, as much as anyone’s could be. “. . . No,” Gregor said slowly. “That won’t be necessary.”

“Good,” Cordelia said. “I don’t think it will help, to have all the details. And your imagination won’t come up with worse.”

“. . . Oh,” Gregor said faintly. He suddenly second-guessed the impulse not to ask; maybe it would be better to know than to spend the rest of his life concocting more and more horrible stories.

Cordelia cast out both hands in quick denial at whatever she saw on his face. “No, no,” she said. “I meant you couldn’t imagine. Not you. Not my sweet boy, not my poet.”

And there. There was the impossibly right thing.

He withdrew back into himself after that interview. Cordelia sent him books, and Gregor read about the biochemistry of despair, about the amygdala and the cerebellum. It was all remarkably practical, but with a flavor of that self-conscious mysticism even the most hardened empiricist seemed to fall into when discussing the inexplicable miracle of consciousness arising from nerve tissue. It helped, eventually.

Gregor took stock of his life. He began to deconstruct it, to pick apart those bits of circumstance that could send him into a slump, to discover what he could do about it, and what he couldn’t. It was an oddly ruthless task, looking straight on at things like that. He wasn’t suited to this life very well, but then again, this life likely wasn’t suited for anyone. The trick was to make it work anyway.

He developed a taxonomy for his inner life. He had many more words for bad days than for good ones. There were just so many kinds of bad days: there were frustrating days, and demoralizing days, and numb gray days, and keenly miserable despairing days that were the exact opposite of numb. Gregor charted himself, as coolly as his economists charted the galactic exchanges. His moods rose and fell and fell some more, riding the currents of biochemistry and circumstance.

And eventually, once in a while, he felt like he might be steering the ship, a little here and there, instead of just riding along.

He thought about his father. And, inevitably, his great uncle. Gregor was a flawed vessel, a poor choice to hold the entire Imperium without cracking under the strain. Would one kind of illness morph into another? Would he wake up one morning hungry for violence? Would he slaughter his nearest and dearest in their beds on a whim?

It was an awful thing to learn, but it explained so much. Poor stalwart Aral, sworn to turn over the reins to an untested child who could so easily grow up into a madman.

There was some relief, knowing. They had been at odds in one way or another for years, since well before the Vordrozda disaster. Gregor had been nebulously angry and frustrated and hurt, and he had wondered over and over what he’d done wrong. Now he knew: he hadn’t done anything wrong. At least not yet.

He summoned the Prime Minister to a private meeting well after dinner late in the fall. He gave plenty of notice, signaled in every way he could what to expect.

Aral was punctual, as always. Gregor received him upstairs in his private rooms, in the safe spaces he rarely allowed anyone.

“Sire,” Aral said, pausing to bow at the door.

“Sit down,” Gregor said, nudging a tray on the coffee table. “Drink?”

Aral stumped to the opposite chair, but didn’t sit. He loomed over the table with his hands behind his back, chin tucked down, brows lowered.

Gregor looked up inquiringly, holding the bottle of scotch. He wondered distantly when that look had stopped intimidating him. Well, not quite as much.

“I’m sorry,” Aral said abruptly. “So sorry, Gregor.”

Gregor clunked the bottle down. “ _Damn_ it,” he said. “That’s where I was going to start. Do you always have to do that?”

Aral rocked back, blinking. Then the corner of his mouth ticked up and his shoulders dropped. “I apologize,” he said politely. “Do go on, I didn’t mean to preempt you.”

“Oh sit down,” Gregor said peevishly, and poured him a drink. “Here.”

Aral accepted it, sitting straight-backed on the edge of the chair like he always did. Gregor poured himself half as much; he had no illusions about his ability to keep up in this company. They sipped simultaneously, eyes catching by accident.

“Right,” Gregor said, putting his glass down. “I’m sorry. It was incredibly selfish of me. I know I put you through hell.” It was a miracle he hadn’t given the poor man a heart attack in the weeks he’d been gone.

Aral dipped his chin in acceptance of that. “I’m sorry,” he said back. “It’s selfish of all of us. We’re putting you through hell.”

The phrase tripped sideways through Gregor’s consciousness, uprooting an ancient fragment of poetry. _I myself am hell,_ then, oddly, _My mind’s not right_.

“It’s all right,” he said, then shrugged at Aral’s skeptical look. “More or less. Less, most days, but what can you do?”

Aral nodded his approval of that sentiment, toasting it briefly. His fingers were thick and strong on the little glass, his knuckles knotted with age and work. He had never been Gregor’s father, not really, though Gregor liked to think Aral had more claim to the notion than the literal contributor of half his genes.

“You know, I couldn’t wait for my twentieth birthday,” Gregor said wryly.

“Neither could I,” Aral said, in the tones of a confession. “I kept a calendar in the fresher at home, marked it off every day while I was shaving.”

“I had no idea,” Gregor said. Not that he would have believed it, at the time. The vultures had been circling in close at that point, filling his head with quiet insinuations about his power-mad regent, and the need for a clean sweep. It could still make Gregor flush to remember the things he’d let himself believe then. Amazing what could grow in vulnerable ground.

“I thought of offering you my retirement tonight,” Aral said suddenly.

“What?” Gregor thunked down his glass.

“My retirement,” Aral repeated patiently. “I don’t have a ready successor, but perhaps you would prefer to groom your own.”

“Oh,” Gregor said, seeing the offer for what it was: a complete break, an open field. A clean sweep, as a matter-of-fact. Gregor would be a disaster for a while, but he’d be his own disaster. What an enormous relief. What a _terror_.

“The only way I’ll retire is by way of a bullet or a bomb,” Gregor said. Most people hushed him when he said things like that, scandalized as if he’d breached some drawing room etiquette.

Aral merely nodded. “That’s true,” he said. “Though I’d like to think you have a reasonable chance of aging out.”

Gregor accepted that with an opened hand. “The only way you’re retiring is when I damn well tell you to,” he said.

Aral’s head rocked back. “Yes, Sire,” he said, blinking rapidly.

Gregor exhaled, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “I don’t want to start over with you,’ he said carefully.

“Can’t,” Aral agreed, nodding.

“No.” Too much resentment on his end, likely too much history on Aral’s. But what was there to do with history, after all? “But we can move on?” he asked.

“Yes,” Aral said, meeting his eyes with that bullish frankness. “We can.”

**Author's Note:**

> The poem Gregor quotes in fragment is ["Skunk Hour"](http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enam312/2004/lowell.html) by Robert Lowell, who knew a thing or two about mental illness, if of a different sort.


End file.
